I’m working on a deadline but will have more posting later today…. In the meantime:

Last year on May Day, in MacArthur Park, police used their batons to whack immigrant parents with their kids, plus small NPR reporters and various camera people (with their cameras rolling)—resulting in more than 300 excessive force complaints.

Among this year’s most to-the-point glimpse of what went wrong last year is this report by KPCC’s Frank Stolz talking to Juan Calos Baustista who says he had his leg broken by police at last year’s rally when he was shielding his four year old son.

But a year later, many changes have been made—-both in terms of departmental training, and on the LAPD’s command staff (the replacement of then Central Bureau head, Deputy Chief Caylor Carter, with well-liked Deputy Chief Sergio Diaz, among the most prominent changes).

Whether or not the training and the departmental changes had anything causal to do with it, this year’s May Day was festive and pretty much problem free. Of the photos I’ve seen from the day’s marches and rallies, one of those I like best the photo above of Deputy Chief Michael Hillman, by LA Times photographer Rick Loomis. Hillman is a cop’s cop, beloved by the rank and file as the guy they’d be most likely to follow into hell if the situation demanded it.

Fortunately yesterday’s May Day activities required no such thing.

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A story in this morning’s LA Times gives an intelligent, nuanced glimpse of some South LA gang unit officers who seem to demonstrate the kind of policing that we’d all like to see more of in this city. The writer, Joe Mozingo, and photographer Barbara Davidson also include a video as part of the story and unlike some of the Times earlier efforts, it works pretty well, and genuinely augments the printed reporting.

Here’s an excerpt:

…Los Angeles Police Department officer, Ryan Whiteman, turns down an alley where a gray-haired man in a maroon velour tracksuit is standing in a carport.

“Rudy, I know you don’t live here,” he says. “Why are you over here?”

Whiteman opens his door and hears the clink-clink of glass on asphalt. He drops his head. “Rudy, I know the sound of a crack pipe dropping. Give me that pipe!”

Rudy sheepishly walks it over. Whiteman shakes his head. “I just wanted to talk to you,” the officer says.

He scribbles out a citation as he wheedles information out of the man.

Whiteman is in the vanguard of a push to target hard-core gangs, not with sweeping paramilitary force but with aggressive, targeted enforcement by officers who know the players in the hood.

The mayor’s office and the LAPD are promising to consolidate thinly scattered anti-gang resources and pour them into 12 beleaguered neighborhoods — gang reduction zones — where intense suppression would be coupled with gang intervention and prevention programs.

That coupling reflects an epiphany of sorts, with law enforcement now voicing a refrain that has long been the lonely cry of civil libertarians and community activists: Street gangs are a social phenomenon that cannot simply be bludgeoned out of existence.

“What we’ve really had in the past is a mass incarceration strategy,” said Jeff Carr, L.A.’s deputy mayor for gang reduction and youth development. “We’ve locked a lot of people up and we still have this epidemic problem.”

In his recent State of the City address, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that gang reduction zones would be the linchpin of his plan to overhaul the city’s anti-gang efforts. The goal is to build a network of agencies and nonprofits to lock up hard-core gangbangers, break cycles of retaliatory violence and keep troubled kids off the precipice.

So far eight of the zones are running, with only the law enforcement part in place. The prevention and intervention side of the equation has been in disarray for years, with programs dispersed through different departments and never evaluated to see if they worked.

The mayor is vowing to change that…..

When Bill Bratton talks abut policing smarter not harder, this appears to be a move in the direction of what he means, officers who are focused on the true troublemakers, not the people on the fringe. With luck the officers have gotten to know (and hopefully like) a community well enough to know the difference.

(photo by Barbara Davidson, LA Times.)

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If my schedule will cooperate, I’m going to try to sort through the various views of Special Order 40 and where LA ought to go with it from here. This includes the points of view of LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, City Councilman Dennis Zine and his proposal to amend SO40, the proposal contained in Jamiel’s Law (which is just a little different than what Zine is suggesting), the view taken by the Police Protective League, which in general supports Zine’s proposal.

In the meantime, take a look at this opinion piece in Sunday’s LA Times in which researcher Monica Varsanyi tells what 450 police chiefs across the country said when asked how they feel about cops doing immigration enforcement.

And be sure to read the compilation in this morning’s LA Times Opinion in which 40 “prominent Angelenos”—chosen from one end of the political spectrum to the other—sound off on Special Order 40.

UPDATE: I missed linking to Rick Orlov’s column on the issue, which is at least fun to read, while advancing the dialog

Here’s pieces of his Bratton quote:

(ABOUT ZINE & HIS MOTION)

“He has not had a conversation with anyone, including my leadership team. He talks so much about being a reserve officer, he should go to his commanding officer for clarification.”

(ABOUT SO 40 IN GENERAL)

“I don’t understand what’s so difficult. We don’t ask people their immigration status if they are not breaking the law. Once they are arrested, we check to make sure they are in the country legally.”

“Our priority is going after gangbangers,” Bratton said. “Once they are arrested, we check their immigration status and if they are in the country illegally, turn it over to ICE.”

I love when Bratton gets on his high horse. (I’m not being ironic here. I actually do.)

And here’s Councilman Dennis Zine:

“This chief doesn’t think anything needs to be changed,” Zine said. “Ask any 10 officers on the street and they will tell you they don’t know what to do with Special Order 40. They feel they can’t do anything.”

Which suggests that Bill Bratton’s right; it’s not a legal issue, it’s a training issue. The problem isn’t with Special Order 40, it’s with the rank and file’s knowledge of it—-meaning the training and oversight on the matter is faulty.

But….although I’ve taken a POV on the issue before, I’m willing to concede that its a complex matter with various valid perspectives to consider. So I’ll continue to gather puzzle pieces for further discussion.

PS: I’ve put in a call to the LAPPL for clarification of their stand. Back with more on that tomorrow or the next day.

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We’ve now seen more than a week’s worth of politically charged emotional fiction pouring from sources ranging from KFI AM radio screamers John and Ken, to author Earl Ofari Hutchinson in yesterday’s LA Times op ed, to a new online column by Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic Monthly. All contain the message that murdered football star Jamiel Shaw would likely not have died were it not for the restrictions of Special Order 40—the 1979 police mandate adopted by then LAPD Chief Darryl Gates that prevents officers from questioning people solely to determine their immigration status or arresting them solely for violations of immigration law.

Here’s how those master’s of veracity John and Ken put it:

If Special Order 40 didn’t stand in the way, the illegal would have been deported, and Jamiel would be alive. It’s as simple as that. We say that Mayor Villar, Chief Bratton and the City Council have blood on their hands!

But let’s review the facts, shall we?
Read the rest of this entry »

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This is how it always happens. There is a high profile killing of a kid whose death breaks our hearts and we put pressure on lawmakers to Do Something to ease our collective pain and rage. In reaction to this pressure, bad laws are passed and loathsome state initiatives are voted into being.

The death of Polly Klass produced California’s Three Strikes law The cocaine-triggered death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias produced the mandatory mimimums and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and resulted in the filling of our prisons.

And now we have the searing heartbreak of the death of high school football star Jamiel Shaw–which has stimulated as a brand new push to make his death feel less horrible, less pointless, less painful……by taking a giant, irrational chunk out of Special Order 40.

It seems that the gang member who allegedly killed Jamiel was a 19-year undocumented Central American who had been brought to the US as a toddler, joined the 18th Street gang as an adolescent, then got himself locked up a weapons charge. When the time came fror his release, the LA Country jail officials, rather than turning him over to the Feds for deportation as Federal law demands, they simply let him let him out—no immigration checks, no nothing.

Now Jamiel’s family, wants the City Council to pass as a “modification” of Special Order 40 that would allow police to question anyone who is a gang member and then to turn them over to INS.

Today, council member Dennis Zine, who usually is a bit more sensible than most, will introduce this badly thought out motion to the city council.

So lets see….how exactly would this work? If the cops run into a 15 year old wanabee who has committed no crime but whom an officer or two thinks might be a gang member do they get to turn them over to INS? Will they turn over their mothers, dads, and younger sisters too, or just the 15 year old?

And who gets to decide who is a gang member? Will we use Cal Gang as our arbiter—nevermind that the gang database that is known for its howling inaccuracies?

We have a federal law on the books that, had it been enforced, would have resulted in the deportation of the screwed up young man who took Jamiel Shaw’s life away. We don’t need poorly conceived amendments that will usher in a host of unintended consequences (as poorly conceived out laws and the like always do).

But, hey, why be logical?

Of course, what we really need is comprehensive gang prevention and intervention programs. (Not to harp on this issue.)

Maybe if we tried harder with prevention and intervention we could have saved both Jamiel Shaw and his killer.

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FINALLY….SOME GOOD NEWS

Yesterday I was critical of what appeared to be one more gang report, this one ordered by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Like most gang policy watchers—I’d reached a state of near apoplexy regarding the plethora of expensive reports, and the absolute dearth of real action resulting from them. Thus I found the idea of one more plan/report/audit entirely maddening.

But after I posted I got an email from attorney Susan Lee from the Advancement Project who told me very nicely that I’d gotten it wrong. This wasn’t just another report at all, Lee wrote, but a set of specific recommendations designed to get LA County to actually take some of the steps that we’ve be clamoring for.

Here’s the deal: One of the things that all the previous reports have made clear is that the only long term solution to LA’s gang violence is to change the community ecology in which the gangs exist. To put it another way, if we really want to get the upper hand on gang violence in a given area we have to change everything: the schools, access to services, the mental and emotional health of the families, the neighborhood. And we have to add new elements to the mix: mentoring, jobs, parenting classes, mental health treatment, youth development sites that feature recreation, arts, job training, and sports….and on and on.

Do we have the money or the organizational wherewithal to make those kinds of changes in LA’s poorest and most gang-fraught communities? Of course not. At least, not right now. (We can’t manage to get our urban schools to work. for God’s sake.)

BUT, what we can do-–as Susan pointed out when we talked later in the afternoon—is to “lay the tracks” for such an endeavor, and from there make changes by increments, but with an uber strategy in mind—instead of the ineffective piecemeal chaos we’ve got now. (That last was my phrasing, not hers.)

It sounds daunting. Okay, it is daunting. But the County plan awaiting approval is designed to pick out several “demonstration sites,” do a comprehensive “needs assessment” in those communities, and then get to work. Once the Board of Sups gives the go-ahead, the ball will begin rolling.

The idea is not without precedent. Probably the closest existing analogue is the Harlem Children’s Zone project in New York which aims to blanket all the kids in a particular low income area with tightly linked services throughout their childhoods into young adulthood, and thus change their ability and opportunity to succeed.

There will be no overnight miracles. This is an in-it-for-the-long-haul deal. And, as Susan said, given the fiscal realities, in the next year everybody’ll be mostly be laying track.

One small reason to be hopeful here is the fact that LA’s most essential players have bought in to the plan and have agreed on the broad strokes planning—namely Chief Bratton, Sheriff Baca, LAUSD’s David Brewer, Jeff Carr from the mayor’s office, Connie Rice, plus the big county health agencies and more.

It is also cheering that LA County CEO Bill Fujioka (the former LA City CAO) is the person chosen to integrate the best elements of past reports and form them into plan of action. Fujioka is an extremely smart dude who is very skillful at finding the hidden money lurking in any given budget and “re-prioritizing” it to meet a pressing need.

Alright, here’s the bottom line: While City Hall remains bogged down in turf battles, the main players have clustered around the County figuring it was the place they might cut through the crap and get something going.

With any luck, a month from now, that’s exactly what will happen.

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Yesterday, the LAPD’s chief psychologist, Kevin Jablonski, told the Police Commission that cops were twice as likely to kill themselves as to be killed in the line of duty. And to help turn those stats around, the Los Angeles Police Department is starting its first suicide prevention program. (Both the Daily News and the LA Times have short articles on Jablonski’s report.)

The LAPD’s suicide rate is higher than that of New York’s police and most other big city forces. Most, but not all. San Diego’s is higher. Higher still is the FBI. And highest of all are the suicide rates for US Customs officers.

The National Police Suicide Foundation has some interesting articles on the subject. Here’s a thoughtful clip from one of them:

Ernesto Banuelos did not die on the street. He shot himself to death one morning in 1997. Despite a growing acknowledgement of the problem, the topic of suicide remains taboo among much of law enforcement’s rank and file. To some extent, psychologists say, that is merely a reflection of society as a whole — uncomfortable with the idea of people taking their own lives. But experts say that those who make their living projecting strength and control are especially reluctant to admit that they need psychological help. They fear they will be perceived as weak.

”Cops don’t talk about that kind of stuff,” says Jerry Sanders, former San Diego police chief. ”They either do it. Or they don’t.”

In many departments, ”if it’s known you’ve thought about suicide, or you’re depressed, it’s next to impossible for you to progress through the ranks,” says Ivanoff, who worked on a 1994 project that evaluated New York City police officers’ attitudes about suicide. ”Because of the negative effect it can have on your career, officers are extremely reluctant to identify each other as needing help and will go to great lengths to ‘protect’ somebody who needs help rather than helping them get it.”

The stress that often leads an officer to commit suicide is at least partially the result of unrealistically high expectations of being a successful cop. ”If you’re a carpenter and you drop your hammer, you bend over and pick it up,” says Don Sheehan, director of the stress management program at the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. ”What happens to a police officer who drops his gun during a bank robbery or misspeaks during a trial? They have to always be in control. Officers learn very early on that they have to always be right.”

It’s been my experience that police officers, like soldiers, often feel that there are few others outside their own ranks with whom they can discuss the intensity of what they experience on the job—and that’s not good.

Not an easy problem to solve. But kudos to the LAPD for taking it on.

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In an era of dire city and state budget slashing, LA City Controller Laura Chick released a report today that shows how the LAPD could get at least 500 more officers out from behind desks and on to the street by filling those same positions with civilian employees—who, as it turns out, cost an average of $29,000 a year less than sworn officers. Some of the positions include public information officers, front desk and security staff, court liaisons and the like.

This is one of those cases where no one’s been thinking clearly, it seems. Mayor Villaraigosa and Chief Bratton have been, quite rightly, trying to hold on to the money needed to hire additional police officers for our drastically underpoliced city. But they are doing so in the face of budget amputations that will be draconian for other city agencies.

(For instance, unless something changes, it has been reported that with $2 million cut from the city library system, LA’s libraries will be unable to buy any new books. None. At all.)

But, during all this push for cop hiring, there has been a freeze on civilian hiring in the department, meaning that more and more cops are behind more and more desks, which is just dumb, said Chick in press conference today (although I don’t believe she used quite those words.) Chick pointed out that step one needs to be an unfreeze on civilian hires, so that the uniformed men and women can be moved out from behind counters and desks and on to the street—which is where most of them would prefer to be anyway.

“We do not need hundreds of police officers, at a cost of $30,000 a year more than a properly trained civilian, performing administrative functions that do not require carrying a firearm. While Chief Bratton has made major progress in deploying our officers more effectively, this report challenges us to fully engage in smarter 21st Century policing,” said Chick.

UPDATE: The LA Times’ Joel Rubin has taken the time to wade through the finer details of the 200 plus-page report and has a very good rundown here.

Bratton is reportedly down for it. And anyone with any sense should be too. The union has not weighed in yet. But we trust that they will see this correctly. ( Right guys?)

UPDATE: Okay, Tim Sands did release a message that states (I think) that he mostly agrees: with Chick, but it is so cautious and pretzeled that it’s difficult to tell.

This is the second smart report in a row from Chick. (Her gang report, on which there has STILL been no action, was very good and sensible as well.)

GO LAURA!

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The R word is the word of the week. At very different ends of the racial spectrum there was Obama’s speech on Tuesday and then, later in the day yesterday, LAPD Chief Bill Bratton told the Los Angeles Police Commission that race had little to do with the nearly 35 percent spike in homicides that has occurred since the beginning of 2008.

As of Monday, writes Joel Rubin of the LA Times about Bratton’s Police Commission report, “….93 people had been killed in Los Angeles this year, compared with 69 during the same period last year.” And the frequency seems to be ramping up. “Two weeks ago, for example, the increase in the homicide rate over last year stood at 27%. The rise is also outpacing those in New York City and Chicago — cities that have seen significant, but less dramatic, increases this year…”

Bratton says race has nothing to do with it. Yet according to some LA residents who attended the meeting (and those I’ve spoken to privately in some of the neighborhoods most affected) race is entering in. There has been, and continues to be, so much vicious racial division and tension inside California’s jails and prisons that to believe it isn’t spilling into the street is unrealistic.

However—and this is a big however—there is little or nothing to suggest that the race is the reason for the spike in homicides. In other words, Bratton’s right. Last year there was gang violence, gang-related tragedies, that clearly had a racial element—although the majority of the shootings and the killings were brown on brown, black on black, This year too.

Yet, the rise in killings seems to have no racial pattern. Certain local TV commentators would like to suggest that it does, but a look at the individual homicides says otherwise.

Northeast, the LAPD division that’s seen the biggest jump in deaths, can find no such pattern. (Just to check, I went over the details with one of their homicide detectives.) There has been a spate of gang paybacks as there has in some areas of South LA. But nothing that constitutes a pattern.

At the news conference, Deputy Chief, Charlie Beck, head of the LAPD’s South Bureau, backed up Bratton’s observations: `If I could find a pattern,” he said, “if I could find something that I could immediately impact through resources or investigations, I would. I think that’s the important thing … know that we do not just accept an increase.”

Weirdly enough, while murders are up, I noticed in trolling through LAPD statistics, shootings are down so far this year. Since, guns were used in 77 percent of the murders, it appears that, although there were fewer shots fired, more of them connected with fatal consequences.

A certain level of public alarm resulted from the heartbreaking string of “innocents” shot: The football player with the soldier mom, the six-year-old shot in the head, the kid killed as he picked lemons.

Yet most of the murders, as is usual for LA, go unnoticed by anyone outside the victim’s circle of family and friends—and of course by the police who investigate the murder.

One all but unnoticed murder was that of Jason Gray, a 29-year-old former gang member who was proud of the fact that he had left the street behind and was working at Homeboy Industries. Jason was shot on New Years Day as he was visiting his mother’s grave at Forest Lawn in Glendale. He was very first homicide of the year. His shooting is believed to be gang related. Somebody likely went into the cemetery looking around for “enemies”—homeboys visiting other dead homeboys on the holiday. Whoever it was saw Jason paying respects to his mother and evidently decided he would do.

A pattern and a reason d’etre may yet emerge for the overall rise in murders (numbers which, by the way, are only up 7 percent over 2006.) But it ain’t there yet.

But here’s a pattern for you: According to the most recent count, there are more than 100,000 young men and women in Los Angeles, ages 16-24, who neither have jobs nor are they in school. With the growing economic dive, that number is likely to rise. It doesn’t take an elaborate computer analysis to figure that the crime rate may very likely follow.

(photo by Barbara Davidson, LA Times)

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In this morning’s LA Times, Tim Rutten has a worthwhile, if somewhat unorganized column in which he talks about the fact that law enforcement alone can’t solve the gang problem (which everyone with any sense, including our police chief and our sheriff, has been saying for years).

But Rutten has another point to make. He writes that, although two city-commissioned reports (each costing megabucks) have told us in detail what kinds of gang intervention and prevention strategies the city ought to be supporting for maximum effectiveness, due to political squabbling and turf battles among city officials, nobody’s very likely to convert the recommendations into action anytime in the near future.

(At least that’s generally what he said. Rutten’s column was littered with some strange analogies that, at moments, tended to muddy his thesis.)

Here are a few clips.

Gang violence is to Los Angeles politics as the weather is to conversation: Everybody talks about it, and nobody ever does anything about it.

Policing occasionally provides a temporary surcease, [surcease???] as it did last week when a drive-by murder next to a grammar school playground and a subsequent shootout between heavily armed gunmen and Los Angeles Police Department officers paralyzed parts of two neighborhoods northeast of downtown for hours. Early Wednesday morning, a police sweep apprehended 19 alleged gang members and seized guns and drugs.

But though the department is willing to take on gang violence where it becomes particularly virulent, treating this solely as a policing issue is a bit like asking the overextended, understaffed LAPD to engage in an endless game of Whac-a-Mole.

[SNIP]

Every few years, our political establishment runs out of ways to look away and begins demanding another study, a fresh approach, a new initiative. First came an assessment of Los Angeles’ anti-gang efforts commissioned by the City Council and written last year by civil rights attorney Connie Rice.

She’s one of those civic activists who is both principled and shrewd, but the report is a dead letter. It’s more than 100 pages long and demands new programs by the carload.

[SNIP]

Meanwhile, City Controller Laura Chick this month issued her own audit of ongoing anti-gang efforts. She doesn’t see a need for any new funds, but she wants to reallocate money from some programs and consolidate all of them under a single anti-gang czar, who would report directly to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He likes the idea, as do Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Police Chief William J. Bratton.

Chick’s proposal, however, is unlikely to go any further than Rice’s because it’s opposed by Councilman Tony Cardenas, who chairs the Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development.

Ironic that good gang policies are falling victim to bickering about who controls what “territory” between the supposed adults.

Anyway, read the rest here.

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